Dark Horse

by J. Carson Black

  Clay brushed past her as he went to check the steaks, eliciting a fan of goose bumps up her arm. “You’ll have a lot to think about on the drive over.”

  The way things were going, she would probably be thinking about him.

  “Why don’t you make Ernesto your assistant trainer? That way, if you get hung up, he can work the filly for you.”

  “I said I will, and I will.”

  His mouth crooked in a grin. “You’re one hell of a procrastinator.”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow, before I go. But I’ll only be gone for a few days.”

  “You never know.”

  She didn’t expect his words to be prophetic.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Dakota reached the turnoff to Black Oak in the afternoon. Before she left, she’d made Ernesto her assistant trainer, which gave him official authority to work the filly during her absence. She hated to leave Shameless, even for the weekend, but this trip couldn’t be avoided.

  If Lone Star had called just one week later, all the demons from hell couldn’t have dragged her away. But the only thing Ernesto had to do was pony the filly at a walk and trot around the track. Ernesto had great instincts, and Dakota knew he would handle her filly like a Faberge egg. She told herself to stop worrying.

  As it turned out, there was enough worry to go around—in Sonoita.

  When Dakota pulled up, she saw the vet’s van parked outside the barns, along with a small knot of people. A backhoe stood off to the side, its very presence ominous.

  Her sense of uneasiness turned to dread as Dan came toward her. His face had blanched so that even his freckles were invisible. Bad news. The broodmares?

  She heard the oily voice on the answering machine again: I can cut their throats.

  “What happened? Is it the mares?”

  “It’s Something Wicked.”

  She watched his lips move, unable to take in his words. Numbing fear filled her throat. “Is he hurt? What happened?”

  Dan removed his hat. “He’s dead.”

  Stunned, Dakota walked a few paces toward the stallion barn.

  “He’s not there. We just buried him.”

  “You buried him?” Dakota repeated. But the words didn’t really register.

  “Up on the hill with the others. Coke would’ve wanted that.”

  “What happened?”

  “We think he hit his head. Hit it just right and it killed him. Found him this morning when I went in to feed.”

  The mists were clearing. “Hit his head? On what?”

  “The roof of the stall, I guess. Something must have spooked him, he must’ve reared up, and bang, hit one of the struts.”

  Something about what he said didn’t make sense. The ceilings were high, to prevent just such a thing from happening. Still in the throes of denial, Dakota walked over to his stall. It was empty.

  There was no blood, but there didn’t have to be. If a horse hit his head just right, the blow didn’t have to be a bad one. A good hard tap on the poll would mean instant death. But he would have had to jump to get that high, and there was very little room for a horse to gather himself to jump like that. Horses kicked at their stalls, and sometimes reared, but they didn’t jump.

  Not usually. But freak accidents happened all the time with horses. She should know that by now. She started to shake from the adrenaline rush.

  Dan came up beside her. “What rotten luck!” he said with feeling. Dakota studied him. He looked shell-shocked. He swiped at the sweat from the indentation above his upper lip, and his hand shook. “We almost had him sold. Just one more day. I can’t believe it.”

  “These things happen,” she said, automatically trying to comfort him.

  “I know, but this is too much. Goddamn it,” he muttered. “I hate to see that kind of waste.”

  Dakota understood only too well. She felt ill. Her heart literally ached. Too many horrible things had happened at Black Oak . . .

  Too many. “Do you think someone might have done this?”

  “What? Hit him on the head? Why would someone want to do that?” He stared at her, his eyes turning bright as the realization hit. “You mean the threats? But they were against the broodmares.”

  “No,” Dakota said heavily. ‘They were against me. Maybe this was the one way they could get at me.”

  “The sheriff said it was just a prank.”

  “This isn’t a prank.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know . . .”

  “What did the vet say?”

  “The same thing we thought.”

  “But he didn’t do an autopsy.”

  “What was the point? The horse hit his head. It happens. I thought I should bury him—”

  Dakota brushed past him and walked over to Ames. “May I see the report?” she asked.

  He handed it to her. “I’m sorry, Miz McAllister. It’s a terrible thing.”

  She looked at the paper in her hand, which was signed by Dr. Jared Ames, DVM.

  “You need to sign it,” he said. The paper certified that one nine-year-old bay stallion named Something Wicked had died due to a trauma to the head. A string of long medical words described the exact area of the injury.

  “Just a minute. Shouldn’t you have autopsied him?”

  “The diagnosis was obvious.”

  “But you know someone has been threatening my horses!”

  Jared Ames’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “Don’t tell me my business, young lady.”

  She closed her eyes, remembering the day she saw Something Wicked breed the dummy mare. The thought of that beautiful stallion lying in a grave, his nostrils and eyes clogged with dirt, his coat dull and stiff—

  Did she dare impose another indignity on him? He was gone. Why not let him lie? Then she thought of Shameless’s close call. Someone had already made an attempt on her life. What if Something Wicked’s death was planned, too? There might be some proof that someone had killed the stallion. She could not let it go. “You’ll have to dig him up.”

  “Dig him up? Are you crazy?” the vet demanded.

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you your job,” she replied stiffly. “When a horse dies of unnatural causes, it should be autopsied. Especially a valuable stallion like Something Wicked.”

  “What in the hell do you know about it? I’ve been taking care of Coke’s horses for seventeen years, and I haven’t had any complaints!”

  “I want an autopsy done on this horse. If you won’t do it, I’ll get another vet, and if I do, he’ll be taking care of these horses from now on.”

  He glared at her for a full minute. She matched him stare for stare. At last he yelled, “Fred!”

  Fred Garvey, a local builder who owned the backhoe, detached himself from the crowd.

  “Miz McAllister wants us to go back up there and dig him out!”

  “You’d better use shovels,” Dakota said.

  He shot her a look of such enmity that she stepped back involuntarily. To hell with that. “I’ll watch, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  They trudged up the hill. Dakota choked back tears as she saw the once-magnificent animal hoisted out of his grave. He’d been wrapped in a tarp, secured by straps. His legs stood straight out, reminding her of the plastic toy horses she’d had as a child.

  Bolin removed the tarp and Ames stepped forward. He lifted the lip and called out the tattoo number. Dakota looked down at the tattoo to see for herself, then down at the clipboard through tear-blurred eyes. She might at least look like she knew what she was doing.

  “I’ll have to move him to the clinic,” Ames said. “The way his legs are sticking out, we’ll need a cargo truck. It’s going to cost you.”

  She swallowed her bile. “Then it’ll have to cost me.”

  Later that afternoon, when Something Wicked had been hauled away, the full impact of his death hit Dakota.

  Someone had killed him. She was sure of it. The same someone who had sent
her the notes, the same someone who cut the mares’ manes and tails. The same person who had put oleander in Shameless’s feed.

  They had struck her at her heart. The only thing that could hurt her worse was for them to have succeeded in killing Shameless.

  Dakota dove into the pool and swam laps for over an hour. She swam like an automaton, back and forth, her mind clicking over like a stopwatch. She swam and she mourned, letting her grief propel her from one end to the other, her arms scything the water and legs kicking out behind her. Visions filled her inner eye, of the beautiful stallion that had been the heart’s blood of Black Oak, galloping in the pasture, nodding his head over the stall door as the groom approached with his grain. His coat the color of polished mahogany, his black tail streaming out behind him as he ran, the play of sunlight on his rippling muscles. His inquisitive, liquid-brown eyes. And then she saw him lying flat on the earth, lifeless, all the grace and beauty gone out of him.

  Her tears mingled with the pool water. She felt cold at her very core. Violated, raped. Her heart was a tangle of twisted wires, burning with anger, with pain, with grief. That someone could do such a horrible thing . . . to destroy an innocent animal. Whoever it was, he had earned her hatred for all time.

  When she emerged from the pool, her resolve had hardened. If the autopsy showed the horse had been killed, she would make the sheriff listen. If the sheriff’s office could do nothing, she would.

  But first, she had a phone call to make. It wouldn’t be pleasant. To everyone in the quarter horse racing industry, Something Wicked’s untimely death would be just another black mark against Black Oak. To her, it was devastation.

  Drying off and wrapping a towel around her waist, she went in to place a call to the Lone Star Stallion Station.

  The autopsy showed that Something Wicked had hit his head against something solid and flat, about four inches across. It could have been a strut, but more likely it had been the top of the stall doorway.

  For Something Wicked to hit his head at that angle, he would have to have been partway out the door. The most likely scenario, the vet told her, was that he was being led out of the stall, had reared up, and hit his head.

  Someone had been in the process of leading Something Wicked out of his stall when he died between ten p.m. and midnight, the night before Dakota arrived.

  Who would take a stallion out late at night, except someone bent on hurting it? The mark on the horse’s head could have been made by a two-by-four, for all she knew, although from the angle, the person wielding it would have had to hit the horse from above.

  Dakota remembered the note, TRY AND TRY AGAIN. She expected to hear from whoever was doing this, by phone or by note. Obviously, he was the kind of person who liked to gloat. But no note materialized, and the answering machine recorded only business calls and hang ups. Dakota hated waiting for the other shoe to drop. Monday morning she had breakfast at the Cactus Flower Cafe, trying to return her life to some semblance of normalcy. That was where she heard that Jerry Tanner had been barred from Prescott Downs. Wherever he was, he wasn’t in Prescott.

  Frightened and restless, Dakota wandered aimlessly around the barns. She found herself at Something Wicked’s stall. Ruben, the stallion’s new groom, was in the process of cleaning his stall out. The day before yesterday, a horse had lived here. Now the bedding was gone, the halter with his name on it put away, his water and feed buckets stored in the tack room.

  As she watched Ruben rake the aisle, she wondered if he might be obliterating evidence.

  “Ruben, when you started raking, were there any footprints outside the stall?”

  “All over. Looked like Grand Central Station, you know?”

  Dakota reached up to touch the stall door frame, and was rewarded for her efforts by picking up a sliver. She sucked her finger, tried to pick it out, then looked up again.

  Was that blood? Or just a flaw in the wood? It was hard to tell. “Ruben, get me a footstool, would you?”

  Footstool in place, Dakota ran her hand over the door frame. One patch was rougher, and she narrowly avoided getting jabbed by another splinter.

  Something Wicked had hit his head on this door frame. It would be almost impossible to get a horse to rear up and hit his head in the exact spot that would kill him. Could it have been an accident, after all?

  She went to look in on the other two stallions. Darkscope, Dan’s horse, paid no attention to her. He paced around and around the stall, disappearing into the darkness every few moments to kick viciously at the back wall. His coat was dark with sweat and lather foamed the underside of his wringing tail like shaving cream. The stallion must have sensed Something Wicked’s death, although he had been kept out of sight and scent of him. As she watched, he pawed the bedding of his stall, wheeled in rage, and let go a deafening whinny. He started pacing his stall again.

  “He’s been like that ever since Thursday morning.” Marcie, one of the broodmare grooms, was lounging against the doorway. “Fighting mad. I don’t think he likes his new groom.”

  “I thought Something Wicked had the new groom.”

  Marcie shrugged. “There’s a whole lot of turnover around here. What with most of the staff getting laid off after the dispersal.”

  Something else to feel guilty about. Sell off the stock and you ended up cutting jobs drastically. “How long have you been here?” she asked Marcie.

  “Three years. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

  “He’s a good-looking horse.” A good-looking horse, but a dud. Dakota knew it was unfair to rail against fate, to wonder why Something Wicked had died, and this horse had been spared. She stifled the uncharitable thought.

  “I like to come and look at the stallions, whenever I get a chance. They’re so much more fun than the mares. It’s like, you never know where you stand with a stud. They’re unpredictable. But you take the time, you get to know ‘em. This guy likes licorice. Gobbles it up. I’m not supposed to feed him, but I can’t see it hurts anything.” She walked up, pulled a package of black licorice out of her pocket. “Might calm him down,” she added, holding the black candy out flat on her hand.

  The horse came forward, sniffed the candy, then turned his back.

  “That’s funny,” Marcie said. “He must be really ticked.”

  “It’s been a bad week for everybody.”

  Marcie shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Dakota followed Marcie out, on her way to see Canelo Red, who had been her father’s best stud for eighteen years. He looked so frail. She stroked his nose, telling him that she wouldn’t let anything happen to him. It seemed a safe promise, since no one would have anything to gain by destroying an old pensioner on his last legs. But unreasoning fear for the horse swept through Dakota, and she clung to his neck, crying into his dark red coat. He stood patiently and let her cry herself out.

  Later that afternoon, when the phone finally rang, Dakota let the answering machine pick it up. It wasn’t Something Wicked’s killer. It was Clay.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” she replied dully. “I guess I don’t want to talk about it. I only called Ernesto to make sure Shameless was all right.”

  “She’ll be doubly fine tonight. I’m bunking in with Ernesto.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Someone just killed your top stallion. I wouldn’t turn down any help, if I were you.”

  Weary, she didn’t argue. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “We’ll sleep in shifts. You can call us anytime. What did the autopsy say?”

  Dakota told him.

  “It’s not definitive then.”

  “No.”

  “It could have been an accident.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you ask Dan if he had someone move the horse?”

  “Why would he do that in the middle of the night?”

  “Maybe Something Wicked had colic. Maybe he was nervous, and the groom felt he should move
him for his own safety. There are a dozen possibilities.”

  “Wouldn’t his groom say something?”

  “Not if he was negligent. Handling a stallion is a tricky business at the best of times.”

  It occurred to Dakota that Ruben must have been assigned to Something Wicked since she left for Ruidoso. She was surprised, since Jimmy, the stallion’s regular groom since March, had been working out well, according to Dan.

  Could Ruben have underestimated Something Wicked and let the high-strung horse get out of control?

  “When are you coming back?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “I miss you.”

  She paused, then said with feeling, “I miss you too.”

  And later, as she lay in bed, she felt the familiar ache that was one part desire and one part loneliness. She wished he were here now, lying beside her, like two spoons in a drawer.

  Longed for the strong circle of his arms, for the gentle rasp of his chin against her shoulder.

  What purpose did their enforced celibacy serve? What had it accomplished, other than frustration?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Trish saw the guy again at EI Prado Mall, where she and Billy had gone to get an ice cream cone.

  He was standing in line behind her at the ice cream counter, so that when she turned around to say something to Billy, he caught her eye. As their eyes met, all the fear, the sheer panic, came back to her like a bad dream. She turned away hurriedly and bumped Billy, and the dollar bills he was using to pay for the ice cream fell out of his hand. “Hey, look out!”

  Trish’s legs shook. She could feel the guy staring at her back, imagined his gaze as death rays aimed at her shoulder blades. He was probably wondering where he’d seen her before. Any minute he’d make the connection. He had seen her that night when she and Billy had tried to hide among the oaks on the hill. She knew it.

  Lynette, behind the counter, handed her the cone. Trish’s mouth went dry, and the thought of eating anything made her distinctly queasy. But she took the cone anyway, feeling the sticky substance drip onto her fingers.